posted March 24, 201412:40
The recent Twitter kerfuffle between Matt Drudge and the Obama/media/academic complex over the ObamaCare tax demonstrates in plain view and without question something many of us have known for years: while the organized left insist that they are the only ones smart enough to run the world, they remain astonishingly ignorant of how it works. They’re even ignorant of how the most fundamental parts of laws that they champion operate.

In case you missed it, Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not 'getting covered'... I'M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX” shortly after filing his first quarterly installment for 2014 as a self-employed person. Apparently unaware of how self-employed people pay taxes – which is neither new nor a secret – liberals at the White House, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and the National Journal all responded immediately by calling Drudge either a liar or ignorant, or both. After all, the liberal reasoning went, Drudge could not possibly have paid a cent toward his 2014 ObamaCare "penalty" because it's not 2015 yet.

Yes, these wizards who would organize everything and everyone lack even a cursory familiarity with the most basic of tax realities.

What is it Bill Engvall says? Oh yeah: “Here’s your sign.” These liberals really didn’t need Engvall’s sign at all. They tweeted their own "I’m stupid" signs. Some wrote full-fledged low-information articles, including TPM’s Dylan Scott and the HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young.

In none of these attacks on Drudge did it occur to these media maestros how self-employed people are impacted by the tax ramifications of ObamaCare. If Drudge figures he’ll owe, say, ten million in federal income taxes for 2014 (it’s probably a lot more), he is required to send in a quarter of that now. He would also be compelled to include charming little IRS add-ons in his payment, like the ObamaCare penalty. Or is it a fee? A tax, maybe? Whatever John Roberts decided to call it, Drudge and other self-employed quarterly filers have indeed started paying it.

This is not some esoteric detail, nor is it overly technical – it is a fact of life that all self-employed people have had to deal with for many decades. And not just the wealthy like Drudge or Rush Limbaugh – quarterly installments impact little shop proprietors and tiny contractors as well. Welcome to the Main Street problems caused by applied liberal policies varnished by isolated but powerful interests on K Street and Wall Street. And yet, liberals who are highly paid to comment on such things know nothing about it. Neither do Obama administration hacks who helped ram this absurdity through Congress.

There’s no word if Timothy “TurboTax” Geithner has weighed in yet on the issue. Geither, of course, was the first low-information appointment made by the low-information president-elect in late 2008. Back then, low-information voter euphoria had Obama riding waves of approvals in the 70s.

But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence. You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact. Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country. And why not?

We have a low-information president, who has appointed a low-information cabinet, including the low-information secretary of health and human services who is applying a low-information health care law (one of many such laws) behind the big power of a low-morality Internal Revenue Service. The result of all of this low information in power is a low-liberty nation.

So when Matt Drudge – fully complying with the inane and unworkable law as it applies to his 2014 taxes – calls them out on it, they publicly and bumptiously step in their own pile of ordure. These liberals, who claim that they alone can run the auto industry, the banking industry, and all of health care – haven’t the foggiest notion how one of the most basic tenets of tax law works. This particular part of a disastrous health care law is exhibit A for what happens when those who have never signed the front of a business check in their lives have power over those who have. And power over everybody else, too.

Pardon the worn out cliché, but the inmates really are running the asylum. Yet when you expose their ignorance and incompetence, they just ramp up the outrage. Frankly, Drudge wasn’t even trying to expose their ignorance. He was simply making a point, and the policy mavens came out of the woodwork and volunteered headlong into their own excreta.

And yet, there will be no apologies, nor will any of these pseudo-experts be fired or even censured. This is not what happens on the left. When they make obvious and grotesque mistakes, they simply double down, or change the subject, or attack someone on the right personally. And as we see daily with the headlines around Obama Care, liberals make obvious and grotesque mistakes all the time. This ignorance and arrogance can be demonstrated with Obama Care, and filtered down through almost every other leftist dream program, from Dodd-Frank to the EPA to Common Core.

The profound arrogant ignorance of liberals, on display daily. This is the kind of thing that could make for a dynamic, funny, sarcastic, and effective political message, should an opposition party to the Obama machine ever re-emerge.